After five years and 166 episodes with listeners in 91 countries, this is the final episode of The Art Engager - for now, at least.

For this last conversation, I wanted a guest who felt right not just for the occasion, but for the moment the whole sector is living through. Someone who has spent nearly two decades asking the questions most of us might find too uncomfortable or too speculative to sit with: what does the future hold for museums, and what do we need to do now to be ready for it?

My guest is Elizabeth Merritt, Vice President for Strategic Foresight at the American Alliance of Museums and founding director of the Center for the Future of Museums.

In this conversation we look back at how the operating environment for museums has changed since the Center began in 2008. We explore the assumptions being tested right now around leadership, philanthropy, and the stability of the nonprofit sector. And we look ahead to what museums need to build - and why, ultimately, museums matter.

Listen to find out what's in store for the future of museums; why after five years this feels like the right time to pause; and a proper thank you to everyone who has made this podcast what it is.

The Art Engager is written and presented by Claire Bown. Editing is by Matt Jacobs and Claire Bown. Music by Richard Bown. Support on Patreon

Mentioned in this episode

Episode 158: The Art Engager x NEMO: Who Cares? Museums, Wellbeing and Resilience: https://podcast.artengager.com/episode/who-cares-museums-wellbeing-and-resilience/

Episode 143: Uncertainty: Finding wonder in not knowing with Maggie Jackson: https://podcast.artengager.com/episode/uncertainty-finding-wonder-in-not-knowing/

Designing and Facilitating Slow Looking - starts June 10 2026: https://thinkingmuseum.com/designing-and-facilitating-slow-looking/

Every Single Episode of The Art Engager podcast: https://thinkingmuseum.com/every-single-episode-of-the-art-engager-podcast/

Links for Elizabeth Merritt, CFM and AAM

CFM aam-us.org/topic/center-for-the-future-of-museums/

Back catalog of TrendsWatch reports aam-us.org/trendswatch

Dispatches from the Future of Museums (a weekly roundup of recent news stories illuminating trends and events shaping society, technology, economics, the environment, and policy) aam-us.org/dispatches

2026 AAM Annual Meeting and MuseumExpo. Philadelphia, PA May 20-23 https://annualmeeting.aam-us.org/

Show Links:

Pick up a copy of my book, The Art Engager, for step-by-step guidance on creating meaningful, interactive guided experiences https://www.theartengager.com/

Buy it here on Amazon.com: https://tinyurl.com/buytheartengager

Curated newsletter: https://thinkingmuseum.com/newsletter/

Adventures in (Slow) Looking on Substack: https://adventuresinslowlooking.substack.com/

Hello and welcome to The Art Engager podcast with me, Claire Bown.

I'm here to share techniques and tools to help you engage with your audience

and bring art objects and ideas to life.

So let's dive into this week's show.

Hello and welcome back to The Art Engager Podcast.

I'm Claire Bown, and today is the podcast's fifth birthday.

It's also the last episode for now, at least.

In case you miss my announcement yesterday, I've decided to take a

bit of a break, a sabbatical, if you will, and I just want to take

a moment to talk about that, before we get into today's conversation.

So after five years and 166 episodes with listeners in 91, yes, 91 countries.

I'm genuinely so proud of what this podcast has become.

It has brought so many interesting people, great conversations, and really

unexpected opportunities into my life.

And honestly, I wasn't expecting any of that when I sat down to record those first

solo episodes under a blanket in 2021.

I am a little sad too.

This podcast has been such a big part of my working life for five years,

something I've built week by week, episode by episode, largely on my own.

It began as almost entirely solo episodes, just me a microphone, and

a lot to say, and over time it's grown into the mix of solo and guest

conversations it's been ever since.

And I've learned so much from all of my guests.

It's been a real privilege to get to talk to so many people doing such

interesting and important work in museums and cultural spaces all over the world.

And I really think that having those conversations has also shaped

my own thinking in so many ways.

But I also feel ready, ready to make a bit of space for perhaps new books, new ideas,

new things I haven't yet figured out.

And I want to leave on a high note while the podcast is still at its best, where

there's still energy and curiosity in it.

Whether it comes back in what form and when.

I honestly don't know yet, but I'm not closing the door.

I will have more to say at the end of the episode, including a proper thank you to

everyone who has made this what it is.

Now for this final episode, I wanted a guest who felt right for this moment,

not just for the birthday and the sabbatical, but for the moment the whole

sector is currently living through.

Someone who has spent the better part of two decades asking the questions

most of us find too uncomfortable or too speculative to sit with: what does

the future hold for museums and what do we need to do now to be ready for it?

My guest today is Elizabeth Merritt, vice President for Strategic

Foresight at the American Alliance of Museums and founding director of

the Center for the Future of Museums.

Since 2008 through financial crisis, pandemic, acceleration of AI and

everything in between, Elizabeth and the Center have been scanning the

horizon for the museum sector, helping organizations to think further ahead

than their next strategic plan, and challenging them to question assumptions

they didn't even know they were making.

So in this conversation, we look back at how the operating environment for museums

has changed since the center began.

We explore some of the assumptions that are being tested right now around

leadership, philanthropy, and the stability of the non-profit sector.

And we look ahead to what museums need to build and why ultimately, museums matter.

It's a really wide ranging conversation and I think a fitting one to close

five years of The Art Engager on.

I hope you enjoy it and I'll be back at the end to wrap up,

hello Elizabeth.

Welcome to The Art Engager podcast.

Thank you, Claire.

I'm so happy to be here with you today.

So our first question, as always, is who are you and what do you do?

I'm Elizabeth Merritt.

I'm the Vice President of Strategic Foresight and founding Director of the

Center for the Future of Museums at the American Alliance of Museums in the USA.

So, we are lucky enough to have met once before on

this podcast for the Special NEMO Conference, episode that we did.

But I invited you back here because I wanted to hear more

about the amazing work that you do.

So, can you tell us a little bit about what the Center

for the Future of Museums is?

Absolutely.

The Center for the Future of Museums actually was founded in 2008, which,

if you think back, is a period that was shaped by two huge forces.

Economically, it was the financial collapse sparked by the mortgage loan

crisis, and technologically it was the rapid acceleration of social media.

Yeah, I'd like to say that actually made it easier to launch CFM

because in times of uncertainty people are more open to new ideas.

So in that environment, um, we came out and I said, center for the

Future of Museums is gonna be a think tank and research and development

lab for fostering creativity and helping museums transcend traditional

boundaries to serve society in new ways.

I've been doing, do the math.

I've been doing this for 17 years now, and in that time I've had A

great run of acting as a kind of agent provocateur, challenging museums

to question their assumptions about traditional practices and experimenting

with new ways of doing business.

I felt this was necessary because humans tend to spend a lot of time

focusing on what has been proven to work in the past, because that

seems like a good way to reduce risk.

And that's perfectly valid in a sort of stable time where you

can use what's worked in the past to be successful in the future.

But as the years since our launch have proven this is not a stable

time, so I help museums assess what traditional practices might not

be working so well any longer and experiment with what could work better.

So I like to encourage our sector to explore the edges of what's

possible given time and circumstances.

And, I'm gonna throw this question out there to you, but I was

thinking as you were describing yourself there as an agent provocateur, which is

a lovely description, what does a typical day look like for you in that role?

Well, let me frame what the work falls into.

'cause then the specifics of the day make more sense.

So my assignments are, first of all, to help museums think on a longer timeframe,

which you'd think would be easy since most museums will tell you that they're

there to preserve whatever they're taking care of for all of posterity.

But in fact, we tend to focus on the next two or three years of our strategic plan.

I teach the basics of foresight, which is an established discipline.

But because most museums are never gonna have a dedicated futurist on

staff, uh, my day involves doing a lot of the groundwork for the field.

So I'm scanning the news and saying, what's happening out there that

could have interesting implications?

What's a little signal of how the future could be different than it is today?

Uh, so flagging potential disruptions, for example, the emerging measles

epidemic in the us, and most importantly, helping museums explore

what I call the cone of plausibility.

Some futures call it the cone of probability or the cone of possibility.

So this is a map.

Imagine a cone extending out from a point that is the present, and

basically it's a map of potential futures and it's establishing the

basic truth of foresight, which is we don't know what the future will be.

It's not a matter of magically figuring out what's gonna

happen and telling people.

It's realizing that it could be any number of things.

We have to imagine different potential futures in order to,

first of all, figure out how to be successful no matter what happens.

Because the future may very well not be what we assume it's gonna be.

Most importantly to realize, if we imagine a preferred future every day

as we make choices about how we spend our resources, whether that's time or

money or connections, we can be making choices that help that preferred future

be the one that actually happens.

And when we look back to the start of CFM, back to 2008 and

compare it to now, I mean it feels like a lifetime ago, but what feels fundamentally

different over that span of time?

Perhaps what assumptions about museums have changed?

What feels different about the operating environment?

You know, how would you compare the two?

First of all, let's remember how many massive disruptions

have happened in that 17 years.

So, I mentioned already the financial collapse and the rise of social media.

Those were two that helped launch the center, but since then,

we've had the COVID-19 pandemic.

That was a global disruption .Here in the US and possibly globally we've seen an

increase in the partisan divide that has people more and more angry and unable to

talk across their political differences.

And now we're actually living in what some would call a previously

unimaginable future, in which here in the US non-profits generally and

museums are under pressure to censor their activities and their content.

So I think that when you look at what's fundamentally different,

it's that we can't assume that anything is unimaginable.

There's no assumption that we can depend on.

We're fundamentally having to say, what happened 10 years ago isn't some magical

normal that we're going to rebound to, and we're just looking to dog paddle

until we get back to that stable state.

It's remaining open to the fact that any area of practice, whether it's

cultural practices, technology, the environment, the economy, politics are

being transformed, and we're having to reimagine our institutions and

the needs of our communities in the face of change that's gonna create

some new normal, that at this rate of change, may not last very long either.

If we go back to 2018, one thing that, I went back to read was

a Trendswatch scenario that actually explored a future in which the status

of nonprofits were actually threatened by this global pandemic, back in 2018

you talked about financial insecurity.

You talked about a possible probable nationalist presidential administration.

That felt really quite improbable, very speculative at the time, and yet...

thank you for that.

Yes.

That was a scenario called Wild Times that was included in a scenario set

we published as our 2018 edition of Trendswatch, our annual Foresight

report, and that's still available as a free download on the web.

And the purpose of that set of scenarios, including Wild Times, which was considered

at the time, 'oh, that's the fringy, improbable future we might wanna keep

an eye on', is to bring home this fact that we don't know what will happen and

that even if you can say the mainstream consensuses were going straightforward,

it's entirely possible we'll get knocked off course and something as crazy as,

yeah, a global pandemic, financial insecurity, and a nationalist President

can reshape our operating environment.

And I think it brings home what a guest of yours from a past episode

Maggie Jackson pointed out when talking about dealing with uncertainty, is

in hindsight, if you look at some of the previously 'inconceivable'

events, uh, to quote Princess Bride, like the 911 terrorist attacks, um,

or the COVID-19 pandemic or Hurricane Katrina, devastating New Orleans.

If you go back in time, there were credible experts, not fringe theorists,

saying this is possible, even probable, it may be the kind of uncertain event

where you know it's going to happen eventually, but you don't know when.

But we can game out what that would look like and we can say, 'great,

how could we take that skill of hindsight and turn it forward'.

So instead of saying, well, if you look back, you can see there were

people saying this could happen.

Say who's right now doing credible, thoughtful analysis of what could happen

and take that into account in our planning so that we're not surprised if it does

turn out to be the future we live in.

Yeah, absolutely.

And if we bring it up to date and, um, even if we look back to 2025,

I think there's reason to be fairly unoptimistic, even a little bit gloomy

about some of the numbers you shared in the trends watch report, and I

have some of the numbers here as well.

69% of US museums negatively impacted by executive action.

63% anticipating disruption from philanthropy shifts.

59% of art museum directors struggling to build a qualified candidate pool.

And when you look at all of these figures together, how should we read this moment?

Is this a cycle we're going through or is there something more structural happening?

I think it's structural.

As I mentioned, I think it's shifting from an old normal to a new normal.

One of the fundamental frameworks for foresight is

called the Three Horizons Model.

And it says, you know, the first horizon is the one we're living in now.

That's characterized by a certain paradigm of what works.

And, over time, that dominant paradigm stops working so well and you struggle

to make it work, and you make tweaks around the edges and you try and

patch it, but fundamentally the boat is leaking and it's gonna sink.

And you realize that at some point.

And I think we're at that point in many ways.

Eventually you're gonna reach the third horizon, which is having arrived at a new

set of successful paradigms that do work.

Unfortunately, in the middle is the second horizon, which is

this messy experimental time.

When you have to do things that fail and go back and rethink it,

it's, it's very uncomfortable.

It's a high degree of uncertainty, but that going through that second

horizon is the only way you're gonna arrive at the new paradigms.

One of the strengths of foresight, is it teaches the sneaky technique of skipping

over the Messy Middle and going straight to that third horizon and saying, ' forget

about the hard part for now, let's dream a bit and imagine what would work, what

would be a preferable future that we think would be stable for these reasons'.

And then, effectively, you do what Dr. Jane McGonigal from the Institute

of the Future calls, remembering the future, you put yourself in that

future, that third horizon you've created that you think is going to

be happy and thriving and successful, and you remember how you got there.

It's kind of like cheating when you go through a maze.

If you enter a maze, you know, you turn right and you hit a dead end, you go

back and you turn left, and then you turn right and you hit another dead end.

It's very confusing, right?

'cause somewhere, you know, there's an exit, but you can't see it.

Skipping straight to the third horizon and trying to remember how you got there is

like being on a hot air balloon floating above the maize and looking down and you

see the end point and you're, 'oh, okay.

I can trace backwards to where I am now', and it's much easier

to see what the path forward is.

And if we look at this year's Trendswatch report, there are three

kind of strands or perhaps assumptions, these long held ideas that people feel

less secure about than they once did.

So you talk about leadership pipelines, philanthropy, and even the kind of

stability of the nonprofit sector itself.

When you put these three together, what picture are they painting

about the environment that museums might be moving into?

So the theme of this year's Trendswatch

was Questioning Assumptions.

Because assumptions are what tend to lead you in the wrong direction for

a long time before you realize you were going in the wrong direction.

So for leadership, for example, the assumption would be everybody

wants to be a museum director or a manager and move up the ranks.

And anytime you advertise a job, there's gonna be lots of qualified

candidates that make it relatively easy to fill the position with somebody

well qualified, who's going to succeed.

That is wrong in so many ways right now.

Uh, I quote a longtime museum director from the US, Laura

Raicovich, who said, I'm paraphrasing.

Nobody wants to be a museum director right now because it's a lousy job.

It's very high stress.

It's all of the expectations of the public and the board of trustees and the staff

who now have the power via social media to be, you know, harassing their directors

from below, holding them accountable.

And part of it's generational.

There's a lot of data saying that millennials and Gen Z don't have

the same views about their life, that it's automatically, you

want to rise through the ranks.

A lot of people are more concerned about work life balance.

They see management as being a lot of stress that isn't

compensated with adequate money.

So I think museums have to spend more conscious time saying, how are we

going to make ourselves supportive, desirable, healthy workplaces that

people want to not only work for, but stay in and take on more responsibility.

And that means, that's a fundamental mind shift from we have a job

we're gonna advertise it to.

We need to be a training ground.

So museums have to think about providing broad training in a

variety of skills for all staff.

So it may not be, you know, we're gonna advertise this development position.

It might be, let's make sure that all staff who might want to become a

development person in the future, have access to mentoring or in internal

internships or training, that help them explore that as a career path.

Uh, so there's cross training and there's mentorship.

There are examples of museums actually doing this.

This isn't just me thinking it up out of my head.

The Bullock Texas State History Museum has created apprenticeship positions

for people with good but non-museum specific experience and training.

The Taft Museum in Cincinnati sees itself as a training ground.

They call themselves a triple A league training ground for the major

leagues, that can launch staff into careers and museums across the country.

I also think that creates a healthy focus on creating an environment

people want to work in because our field has long been sadly underpaid.

There certainly may be constraints about what we could offer in terms

of pay compared to big for-profit businesses, but that doesn't mean we

have to settle for sub minimum wage.

And there are also things that we have the um, ability to do to

create much better work environments that we could take advantage of.

So that's leadership.

Yeah.

Philanthropy.

We can't just assume that the people who used to give to traditional institutions

as they die, their heirs are going to immediately behave the same way.

They're gonna say, I want to support the symphony or the opera, or the big

local art museum because, they're the cornerstones of our community and.

The way I show my prestige in the community is to

give to those institutions.

Uh, younger people are much more, first of all, they're not in

financially a secure shape often.

At least in the US , if you go down below the top 10%, a lot of people are

struggling to make rent and buy groceries and are struggling with student debt.

So it's a big decision to give to nonprofits and a lot of younger

people are saying, 'I care about causes', like saving the environment

or improving this in my neighborhood, not, 'I love that institution, so

I'm gonna give to that institution'.

So I really think museums have to think fundamentally differently

about philanthropy and consciously how to cultivate support.

I read a really great piece of research this week.

It's from the uk and it shows that people who hadn't visited the Natural

History Museum in London for the past three years, okay, so they

hadn't visited, they know about the museum, but they haven't been there.

They're still willing to pay an average of almost 12 pounds, which is

about $16 US, to support the museum.

Even though they're not going, to ensure that the museum is preserved

for current and future generations.

So the researchers called this a measure of 'non-use value'.

One thing I pointed out in Trendswatch is the tendency of nonprofits to

structure, to incentivize fundraising in ways that I think can be problematic.

So how do you make your goal for raising a lot of money?

Go to a few big donors and get large gifts.

But relying on a few large donors can amplify the risks of losing any one of

them, for example, if their interests or financial situation changes.

There have been unfortunate examples of museums relying on promised

gifts that didn't come to be because of financial challenges.

It can also make a museum unwilling to say or do things they fear

would alienate a major donor.

So it's giving one person who, who happens to be wealthy, a

disproportionate amount of influence.

So it may be both more stable and more democratic with a small D to

cultivate a broad base of donors who give smaller amounts, but passionately

believe in a museum's mission or the role it plays in the community.

That could be a lot of work to cultivate, but in the long term, it might be more

stable and it might create a healthier alignment between funding and mission.

So how do we incentivize that kind of fundraising so that it's worth the work?

Oh, and you brought up the last challenge being nonprofit stability.

Well, I think it starts by taking a step back and recognizing that a lot of

visitors don't know what a nonprofit is, don't know the role that the nonprofit

sector plays in society and may not know that a particular museum is a nonprofit.

Right?

So how can you expect people to really support and defend a

structure that they don't understand?

A federal official in the US here in the US recently commented something

to the effect that we cannot have arts institutions that lose money.

So sit with that for a moment, right?

For many years we've said like nonprofit is a tax status, not a business model.

So no, we're not here to lose money, but we need to educate our representatives

and career staffers and local, state and federal government and the public

that nonprofits don't quote unquote, 'lose money' because they can't cover

their costs with earned revenue.

Uh, as the wonderful commenter Emil Kang wrote in a recent post on his

substack which is called The Reprise, highly Recommend, he said, quote, 'tax

exemption isn't a loophole or a subsidy for inefficiency, it's a social contract.'

Building on that.

I'd say we need to raise awareness that nonprofit status and the attached

tax exemption is that social contract.

It's a way for all of us collectively to support activities that make our

nation and our communities better and ensure that arts and culture and

science, first of all,, exist at all.

And secondly, benefit people generally and not just the economic elite.

So when you step back from all of this, we're talking

about the leadership pressures, the changes in funding, questions

about stability for nonprofits.

What pattern do you see emerging now for museums?

What trends concern you the most and where are you seeing

perhaps some encouraging signs?

It may surprise some listeners to learn.

My training is, uh, not in museum studies or arts management.

My training is in evolutionary biology, and I think one of the most promising

things for museums is that the sector as a whole continues to speciate.

If I can use a term of art, we keep spinning off more variations.

Museums that are entirely digital or moved from place to place or created

to address particular critical social or environmental issues.

At the same time, we have our long-term survivors, the museum equivalents

of coelacanths or horseshoe crabs that look practically unchanged from

one or 200 years ago, in a good way.

For example, AM's annual meeting in May is gonna be in Philadelphia.

Today in Philadelphia, you could visit the Wagner Free Institute of Science.

It was founded in 1855, and in many ways, it's unchanged from its 19th century form.

Can go in and see the old exhibit cases and the historic displays of specimens

that collected by the founder and go to fabulous public programming where people

walk in with their own specimens they've picked up and want to have identified

or sit down and sketch the birds.

I wish it was down the block from me so I could visit often.

But at the same time, you could go online and visit the Kramer Museum,

which is a born digital virtual reality museum that launched in

2017 and exists only on the web.

So I think that the bright spot is, as long as we continue to experiment and

show this vast range of variation, we're gonna thrive as a sector in the long term.

And when we look at all of these assumptions together, and I'm

sure lots of listeners will be nodding along to lots of the things that, that

you are saying, listening to this.

so for people listening, working in different museum systems, in

different parts of the world, what should they take from this?

I think the common message, regardless of how

museums in a given country are structured or funded, is the need to

measure and communicate the value of museums as community infrastructure.

Too often when we think about a success, it's numbers, right, which actually,

can be challenging to gather, but theoretically you can measure the number

of people who are attending and how much you brought in from the latest traveling

exhibit, uh, the number of members.

But if you look at the social impact of museums, if you think about the hard but

very rewarding work of showing that we are not just custodians and educators

about history or science or art, but that museums are really fundamental anchor

institutions that promote health and wellbeing, that create livable communities

for the elderly and their caregivers, that foster resilience in the face of climate

disruptions or in the face of cultural and political upheaval, I think then we're

cultivating a common shared understanding of the need to support museums, not just

because, oh, I like going to museums and some people don't, but because

they're essential to the stability and health and future of our countries.

Yeah.

And if we take that as the environment that museums are moving into, what

do they need to strengthen now, what capacity should museums be thinking about

building that they don't yet fully have?

Bearing in mind that museums as organizations and institutions,

they move quite slowly.

So

I wanna tell you a little joke about that.

Uh.

So there, there used to be decades ago, a joke that it was relatively easy to

be a consultant for the museum sector because all you had to do to sound new

and trendy was pick up something that the business community had been doing

for 20 years and say, 'you could do this', and museums would go, awesome.

We could write a strategic plan.

What a concept.

Yes.

But yeah, that doesn't work anymore.

I think if you're looking at the operating environment, we're moving

into two things are top of mind for me that are opportunities for improvement.

One is I think the sector needs to continue an ongoing pivot from teaching

facts to teaching how to think.

So from presenting audiences with a certainty like 'we know this and you

should know it', to actually fostering doubt and curiosity and critical thinking.

One of the basic skills of foresight is recognizing what we can't and don't know

about the future, uh, it's encouraging people to exercise their imagination

to explore many possible futures.

I think the parallel is that museums could take that cone of plausibility

that looks towards the future and pivot it to the other direction, and help

audiences understand how much we don't know about the past, and how, subject to

interpretation and point of view it is.

How we've been wrong about what we thought were established facts, even how different

people in communities may have effectively inhabited different pasts because of

their experience and because of their perspectives and their value systems.

So I think that that's a really important pivot, that we have begun making, but

there's room for continued improvement.

And I think secondly, to go back to the point about leadership that I

made earlier, I think museums should figure out how to make the most of the

freedom that we have as nonprofits to try new organizational structures and

create healthier work environments.

One of my favorite words, this is so geeky, is skew morphism.

Which is a design principle by which the design of a current artifact, whether it's

digital or physical, or a system inherits, the structure of an older system.

So if, you know, if you, I'm looking at my computer and the

save icon is a little floppy disk.

Gen alpha's not even gonna know what that was a, a picture of.

I was just listening to a great podcast about skew morphic systems of healthcare.

In the US, dental insurance is completely separate from health insurance, which

is wacky, it makes no sense because , historically dentists were like not

considered medical professionals.

They were the local barber or the local blacksmith who would pull your tooth.

And because of that historical artifact, we have a dysfunctional

system of healthcare for, for dentistry.

Well, museums have kind of inherited the skew morphic design of for-profit business

hierarchies, and you can argue about whether it's even working for for-profit

businesses, but it's certainly true, that there's no reason as a nonprofit,

that we have to have the same kind of hierarchies or business practices.

At the same time that we're not even able to match for profit salaries.

I think that as a whole, our sector could do a better job of turning our

ability to think about values, not just outwards, how we fulfill our mission, but

inwards, to how we are creating healthy and supportive working environments.

Sometimes that's gonna mean bucking the traditional nonprofit

culture of virtuous poverty.

Museums may find that when they do that, it's actually better business.

Uh, here in the US when the historic site and garden Filoli committed to paying

a living wage, which given where their site is, a pretty high wage, their costs

actually went down because they had better staff retention and they didn't

have all of the loss of institutional knowledge and discontinuities and work.

So it was better for the museum's bottom line, and it was better for the staff.

Sometimes it might mean creating an organizational chart that puts

the, audience at the center, like the daisy diagram that the Oakland

Museum of California did, rather than putting the CEO top on top and

then mapping the stratographic layers of power that go down from there.

So we have a lot of room to experiment.

I think we should do so..

So when we are looking ahead, to the next decade.

Again as we talked about at the beginning it's very, very difficult to predict

the future, but it's always useful to have that foresight, what kind of

choices will matter the most for museums?

Okay.

I think that the choices museums have, are choices that are both going to protect

the influence they have and increase the effect they have on the world.

So bear with me.

I'm a data geek and there are many sources of data, decades long showing

that museum's greatest superpower is the power of public trust.

We have decades of data from the US showing that not only are museums

along with libraries, the most trusted institutional sources of information, they

only come in second to friends and family.

That trust is actually going up.

I have 2026 data showing me that trust is going up, even as other levels of

trust in the government are going down.

But I think we have to be aware, we're surrounded by many forces that

could erode that trust in the face of proliferation, of artificial intelligence,

ai, fakes, and misinformation.

How do we make sure that museum content and the museum voice

continues to be authentic and trusted.

In the face of political pressure to censor our content or conform

to particular points of view, how do we show that we're gonna

remain true to our mission and values and to brave truth telling.

Museums matter because they're basically humanity's collective memory.

They're places where we reposit the knowledge and the feelings and

the memories of our communities.

And they're are places that bring people together to experience

and make meaning of that memory.

I believe that this trust in this role gives museums the power to

change the world for the better.

That's my inspiration for doing this work.

So I think going forward we're faced with a lot of threats to maintaining our

trust and staying true to our missions.

But a lot of opportunities because there are a lot of things in the world that

need fixing, and I really do believe we can contribute to those solutions.

I think that's a wonderful note to end on.

I would love for you just to add how listeners can find out more

about you and your work at the Center for the Future of Museums.

Certainly the Center for the Future of Museums is an initiative

of the American Alliance of Museums, and you can find us on the web at aam-us.org.

We are an independent nonprofit, not a government agency.

So a huge thank you to Elizabeth Merritt for being a guest on the

show and what a conversation to end on.

I hope it's given you lots to think about.

I promised you a proper thank you at the end.

So here it is.

Thank you to everyone who has listened to this podcast.

Whether you've been here since episode one, or you found it last week,

thank you for making it what it is.

I genuinely could not have done this without you or your support.

Podcasts only exists because people listen.

And knowing that there were people in 91 countries tuning in, thinking about these

ideas, taking them back into their work in museums and cultural spaces around

the world, that has meant so much to me.

And if you're new to the podcast or if you've never had a chance

to dig into the archives.

Please do so.

There are 166 episodes in the back catalog covering an enormous range of

subjects from slow looking and questioning to facilitation, wellbeing, social

connection, leadership, and so much more.

It's all there and it's not going anywhere.

I am also not disappearing.

In June, I'll be running a new live online course designing and facilitating

slow looking, and you can find out more about that through my newsletter.

Curated, my Substack Adventures in slow Looking, and my

website thinkingmuseum.com.

And if you'd like to go deeper into the ideas behind the podcast, my book,

The Art Engager Reimagining Guided Experiences in Museums is out now.

All the links are in the show notes, and as for the podcast we'll see.

I'm leaving the door open, but for now, thank you.

Take care of yourselves and keep looking slowly.

Thank you for listening to The Art Engager podcast With me, Claire Bown.

You can find more art engagement resources by visiting my website,

thinking museum.com, and you can also find me on Instagram at Thinking

Museum, where I regularly share tips and tools on how to bring art

to life and engage your audience.

If you've enjoyed this episode, please share with others and subscribe to the

show on your podcast player of choice.

Thank you so much for listening, and I'll see you next time.